Has it a hope of working?

Hi all,
as the title to this thread suggests I am soo fed up of getting spam in my inboxes. So Ive decided to set up a site that will effectively name and shame all ISPs that harbour spammers, that is they get reports of spam from the same originating source more than once and do nada about it.
Main thing im wanting to check before I put the work in to set it up is 1) is there already an intiative like this that ive forgotten/dont now about and 2) What are peoples thoughts on it and 3) any legal repurcussions people can think of?
Hopefully if enough people contribute to it then those ISPs that are worst for it may see the fact that people are boycotting all their services as sufficient motivation, but who knows?
Ideally it will be an SQL database with a PHP frontend, maybe joomla, or perhaps ill go the whole hog and try and write it all myself, any other suggestions are very welcome Spam is like a cancer on the internet, slowly eating up more and more resources, and it is time someone actively tried to stop it rather than just filter it.

2) What are peoples thoughts on it...
I don't think it'll make the slightest difference, but it may be a usefull & interesting excercise for you.

3) Any legal repurcussions people can think of?
IANAL, but wouldn't think so.

Personally I've found that by routing all my mail through a Gmail account, that filters out %90 of spam. Then using Firefox filters out %90 of anything that gets through. If I was more bothered then I'd install Spamassasin or similar.

[edit]
Having read through my response above it sounded a bit negative, which was not the intention. I agree with your sentiments about SPAM but I just feel that there's no hope of stopping it (at least like this) so the best thing to do is ignore it - which is pretty easty to do these days. I reckon the only way the ISPs will get involved is if the level of SPAM gets to the point where it impacts their network/servers/service, and then they might take more responsibility.

That's why I started feeding everything through my Gmail account. as it sidelines all the SPAM and doesn't download it through the POP connection. It keeps the SPAM in a separate folder for 30 days and then deletes it (giving you a chance to periodically check for any false positives).
I'm not claiming Gmail is a global panacea but I've found it really usefull in weeding out spam.

Using pop filters, as you can with KMail, you don't even need to download it, just set the file size to 1KB. 90% of all spam sent to me is deleted on the server (while known non-spam is marked for download), for the rest I get to look at the headers and can choose what gets downloaded or deleted.

Spam is a strange thing.
some ppl get huge amounts of it, others don't.
Personally, I use a seperate email account whenever signing up on a web page or mailing list.
e.g. at the moment my signup email is spamdumper2@....
if it ever gets overloaded with spam, it will become spamdumper3.
Blueyonder, my isp gives me 5 mailboxes with 4 aliases each.

Years ago my first email address was hammer@enterprise.netwhen it got clogged with spam, I changed it to starship@enterprise.net (call me sad, I don't mind).
these days ,I have several email addresses, and I am careful who gets them, but I get very little spam.

The sig between the asterisks is so cool that only REALLY COOL people can even see it!

The idea is:
never give an email address to a website or mailing list etc, that you want to keep.
For some of us with public facing emails, it is difficult, buit even my business email gets less than a dozen spam email a week.
I have one customer who gets thousands a day.

The sig between the asterisks is so cool that only REALLY COOL people can even see it!

Just to point out, I have been on the internet nearly 10 years, I have changed my main email address twice.
I receive approx 40-50 emails a day(at home), of which 2 or 3 are spam.
At work, I receive about the same number, but the level of spam is about 50% higher.

The sig between the asterisks is so cool that only REALLY COOL people can even see it!

I have never given out the email address in question to anyone but friends, yet I still get spam to it, not in any vast quantity but enough to be annoying. I think the main cause of this spam is probably due to chain mail that people insist on sending me.

Some people also need to be educated about sending mass mailings to everybody in their address book... how often have you received an email from someone moving jobs which has their entire address book in the "to" field ? If one of the other recipients has Outlook Distress set up to automatically add addresses to their address book & then gets harvested by a spam bot, you're on a spam mail list. If people must send out mass messages like that they ought to send to themselves and then bcc their address book !

Until very recently, I seemed to get almost no spam. Now I seem to be getting 4-5 messages a day. I haven't yet figured out what triggered the increase.
I know that whenever I buy something from ebay I get a rash of phishing messages trying to get me to enter my details into a spoof site (all of which, of course, get forwarded to spoof at ebay dot co dot uk). If I don't use ebay for a couple of weeks they peter out, only to resume when I next buy something. That makes me wonder about how secure ebay is...

No there is one thing worse than people sending to their entire address book, and that is these people who do something online (say a quiz on hunour type) and then use the find out how your friend did box, You get an email from the company saying so an so got this, see how you can do, then even if you don't visit the site the spam just keeps on coming. The risk is not always you giving out your email address to someone you shouldnta its also people you know doing it.

wyliecoyoteuk wrote:The idea is:never give an email address to a website or mailing list etc, that you want to keep.

ehhhh, me thinks you may get an increase in spam, especially with google cacheing this page about 20 seconds after it went up

I found this out recently when signing up to a website, not paying attention and entering my email address as the username, doh!. I got my account deleted, but it had been showing my email as the latest user joined on the front page of the site for about 6 hours. My spam level on that account has gone from nothing to 30-40 pieces a day. Not a lot I know, but just show it doesn't take long.

Its not a major problem though, making good use of SpamAssasins learning capabilities, sa-learn --spam and sa-learn --ham soon have everything being filtered correctly by Kmail.